This book studies African history through a geopolitically transcendent lens that brings African countries into conversation with other relevant histories both within and outside of the continent. The collection analyzes historical figures, struggles for independence and stability, social and economic development, and legal and human rights issues.

In A Tapestry of African Histories: With Longer Times and Wider Geopolitics, contributors demonstrate that African historians are neither comfortable nor content with studying continental or global geopolitical, social, and economic events across the superficial divide of time as if they were disparate or disconnected. Instead, the chapters within the volume reevaluate African history through a geopolitically transcendent lens that brings African countries into conversation with other pertinent histories both within and outside of the continent. The collection analyzes the pre- and post-colonial eras within African countries such as Kenya, Malawi, and Sudan, examining major historical figures and events, struggles for independence and stability, contemporary urban settlements, social and economic development, as well as constitutional, legal, and human rights issues that began in the colonial era and persist to this day.

Introduction: The Future of History: Transtemporal, Transnational across Geographical Borders

Nicholas Kariuki Githuku

Chapter 1: On Writing Kenya’s History

John Lonsdale

Chapter 2: From the Upper Delaware River to the Banks of the Monongahela via Lake Victoria

Robert M. Maxon

Chapter 3: Myth and Reality in the Forging of a Kenyan National History: Oginga Odinga’s Heroism

Robert M. Maxon

Chapter 4: Daniel arap Moi: A Challenge for Historians

Robert M. Maxon

Chapter 5: Ainsworth after Dark: The Pied Piper of African Development in Colonial Kenya, 1895-1920?

Okia Opolot

Chapter 6: Challenge to African Democracy: The Activism and Assassination of Pio Gama Pinto

Godriver Odhiambo

Chapter 7: Eastlands, Nairobi: Memory, History, and Recovery

Betty Wambui

Chapter 8: Plagues and Pestilences in Late Nineteenth-Century Samburuland

George L. Simpson, Jr., and Peter Waweru

Chapter 9: The Evolution of Imperial Social Development Policy and Practice in British Sudan: A Comparative Case Study of the Gezira and Zande Schemes

Joseph M. Snyder

Chapter 10: Illusions about a Boom in Cotton Production in Southern Nyanza during the Depression, 1929-1939

Peter Odhiambo Ndege

Chapter 11: Community Development in Post-Independence Malawi: Deciphering Some Local Voices

Gift Wasambo Kayira

Chapter 12: Regime Policing and the Stifling of the Human Rights Agenda: Late Colonial and Post-Colonial Malawi, 1948-Present

Paul Chiudza Banda

Chapter 13: The Constitution and Change-the-Constitution Debate in Independent Kenya, 1963-2002

Anne Nangulu

Chapter 14: The Building Bridges Initiative Déjà vu: "A Whitewash Process Taking Us Forward by Taking Us Backwards”

Nicholas Kariuki Githuku and Robert Maxon

Chapter 15: House of Mlungula— “Norms in the Margins and Margins of the Norm:” Of Computer “Glitches,” Moving Human Fingers and Illicit Financial Flows

Nicholas Kariuki Githuku